For fledgling lawyers, jobs get harder to find
Shutdown of Whittier is a sign of troubled times
Closure of Whittier law school could be a sign of things to come
Whittier Law School in California is closing its doors for good next spring, and students and faculty are stunned. It is, after all, a shocking milestone — to be the first ever accredited law school to shut down.
“We were completely caught off guard,” Kristopher Escobedo, a second-year student and incoming student body president at the Costa Mesa, Calif., school, told the Los Angeles Times. “It was almost like an ambush.”
Future lawyers, heed this. Whittier’s demise could be a sign of things to come.
As several trends hit the law profession — fewer graduates, fewer jobs and the specter of growing automation in legal services — experts say more law schools could take a hit.
For young lawyers in all but the most elite schools, jobs already are harder to find.
While a Harvard, Yale or Stanford Juris Doctor (JD) will nearly always find security and top-paying work, those attending nonrated or poorly rated schools will struggle as their profession contracts. Even students at moderately rated schools could see prospects shrink, statistics suggest.
Whittier’s travails are fairly well-known — it has long struggled to stay afloat, with downturns in both applications and average LSAT scores. But its struggles are taking place, in some form, at schools nationwide. That’s making many wonder: Is Whittier an outlier or a bellwether, an unfortunate white elephant or the proverbial canary in the coal mine?
Over the past six years, Whittier’s first-year enrollment had dropped precipitously, from 303 students in 2010 to 132 last year, according to Law School Transparency, an online watchdog. Average student GPA and LSAT scores dropped, and its state bar passage rate fell to 22%.
Whittier’s estimated full price — $284,377, according to the transparency site — put it at 28th highest nationwide, even as its “employment score” put it among the bottom 10 law schools nationwide. Only 2.3% of graduates in 2016 landed jobs with large law firms, a common measure of quality, according to the site.
Even with its difficulties, Whittier is “not an isolated case,” said Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a business think tank that focuses on innovation. “A lot of non-elite law schools are in this situation.”
Like many schools hovering below the top tier, he said, “They’re hunkering down just long enough until it thins down at the bottom.”
Overall, the job picture for law school graduates remains comparatively healthy. The class of 2015’s employment rate is 86.7%, according to October 2016 findings by the Washington, D.C.based National Association for Law Placement.
But that’s about 5 percentage points lower than the employment rate for the class of 2007, which graduated before the economic downturn.
About two-thirds of 2015 graduates landed jobs that required passing a bar exam, down sharply from more than three-fourths in 2007.
And the number of jobs that 2015 graduates found was down by more than 3,000, compared with a year earlier. Since the number of graduates was also down — 39,984 in 2015 vs. 43,832 in 2014 — the employment rate remained basically unchanged.
Over the long term, though, the trend seems troubling: In 2015, U.S. law schools graduated nearly 10% fewer students than in 2010.
Horn and others note that dropping enrollments already have taken a toll on other law schools. In 2015, two small Minnesota schools, Hamline University and William Mitchell College of Law, merged.
Also in 2015, Washington became the first state to license “legal technicians,” non-JDs who are permitted to advise clients in limited areas such as family law, divorce and child custody, but who can’t represent them in court.
Cristina Messerschmidt, who graduated from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in May and is studying for the Illinois bar exam, said she’s got a “10-year plan” to pay back about $250,000 in loans. She’s not worried about paying the sum back, “but you never know how that changes.”
Messerschmidt, 29, already has a job lined up, practicing data privacy law at a major Chicago firm. She did a lot of criminal defense work in school and would like to be a public defender someday, but she knows that a job at a big firm will help her pay down her debt faster than a low-paying government job.
“You can’t really help but think, ‘What if ?’ ” she said. “’What if I didn’t have all this debt? What would I choose to do?’”
As corporate legal departments and law firms operate under growing pressure to cut costs, technology is also displacing young lawyers who in years past would have spent their days doing research. Online startups such as LegalZoom, Avvo and LawDingo, many of which also match clients with lawyers, are automating “low-level lawyerly tasks” — not just research, but contracts and wills, among other tasks, Horn said.
Automation, Horn said, is “basically making lawyers within big firms more productive, so it’s reducing the need to bring in firstyear lawyers, as you did in the past.”
Andrew M. Perlman, dean of Suffolk University Law School in Boston, noted a “significant decline” in the number of students applying to law schools overall, with the market for new lawyers “adjusting to what I think is a ‘new normal.’ ”
Technology, he said, “will not make lawyers obsolete, but there will probably be fewer opportunities for lawyers in the future.”
“(Technology) will not make lawyers obsolete, but there will probably be fewer opportunities ... in the future.” Andrew M. Perlman, Suffolk University Law School